skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you familiar with the 10,000 Hour Rule? It says that the mastery of any skill requires 10k hours of deliberate practice of that skill. Meditation is the act of deliberately practicing and developing one's ability to resist distraction.

The hypothesis is as simple as "Telling jokes is a good way to become funny". Would you demand empirical evidence to support that claim as well? It might be difficult to find research to back it up, as it's so obvious that no one took the time to do a study.

There's no guarantee that meditation will work for you, just like some people might tell a lot of jokes and not get any funnier. If someone was forced to tell jokes like you were forced to meditate, they probably wouldn't like it either. But the value of the meditation seems to be obvious - if you want to get better at resisting distraction, then sit down and practice resisting distraction.
It isn't really something people search for. It's going to be word of mouth until our category solidifies.

What are you working on these days?

Max
I am actually a huge fan of GitHub - I love that they are working on the social features which I have been feeling a need for.

However, even the above sentence does suggest GitHub should somehow charge per user.

Anyway, the last section was interesting:

> Here's the ultimate reality: when tools make you start doing things differently in your code, you know you've fallen into a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario. I just did a huge refactor on a project where I realized I needed to introduce 5 or 6 more jar projects just to tidy a few things up. Counting out these considerations a coin at a time to your undertakers is worse than serfdom.
It is not available in my country, so no. Actually after your comment I've read and watched several modern reviews of the service. Players don't seem to be complaining about the latency so maybe it is really not that noticeable as I thought it would be. Thus my initial point about the latency does not hold much water.
I don't know specifically about bacteria in one's gut, and hadn't thought of that. However, studies of xylitol in both humans and rats all show overwhelming positive (and mostly unexpected) results related to immunity to diseases like respiratory infections and ear infections.

> something I don't want to be eating either, if it's so toxic to both bacteria and fairly similar mammals.

FYI: Chocolate is toxic to dogs as well; a 70% chocolate bar can kill a small dog. Are you going to abstain from chocolate and recommend everyone else does too?

Also: some humans are deathly allergic to nuts, and others to strawberries, and yet others to wheat gluten. These people are a lot closer to you genetically than a dog.

Enough research has been done on xylitol to deem it safe for human use -- much more so than e.g. sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame-K (SweetOne), Aspartame (NutraSweet) and High Fructose Corn Syrup. And while Xylitol does not form naturally, it is a sugar alochol like e.g. Sorbitol (also found in plums and apples), and shares the vast majority of its properties.

Really, do read the wikipedia entry.
So, Native Client?
TED: Talk nerdy to me -- make tech presentations undertandable
Ah no bother -- always a pleasure Paul!
The techniques are so numerous!

There are many techniques that use pure visualization - all in your mind. There are mantra (or prayer) techniques, that require repeating a certain formula, either out loud or silently (in your mind). There are devotional techniques where the practitioner is worshiping an image or a symbol of a deity (the deity itself being a metaphor of some aspect of consciousness states). There are the dancing dervishes. Goes on and on.
It's the forever-aloners who spent half a decade obsessively learning how computers work before college. If the women you're talking about are being driven away by something so tangential as the culture (which isn't between you and the keyboard), do they still have enough insatiable curiosity to be coding alone as a hobby? If not, how do you figure they have the aptitude?

We need more qualified people, but mostly fewer unqualified people. Most of the men we already have are worse than useless, and I don't want to attract anyone who isn't markedly better.
Is there an analysis of some other sorting algorithms and how the behave with branch prediction? I did some google searching and found one paper on merge sort and branch prediction.... specifically thinking about Mergesort, quicksort, heapsort, and introsort.

This stackoverflow post covers the "when to use" parts of various algorithms, I'm just wondering more about the practical vs theoretical runtimes of these sorts.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1933759/when-is-each-sort...
Understanding of the characteristics comes from understanding the implementation. I can not explain why it takes longer to insert in the middle of vector vs a list without explaining at least a rudimentary cartoon of the implementation.
Nice read.

I had a hard time taking Mr Holman's work seriously at first because of his choice of self portraits. They scream "brogrammer" to me.

I'm a convert now, though
Cargo cult startups
If you're up for a coffee, let me know. max@kera.io
So instead of writing Javascript, we would build our own browsers to download alongside the HTML? Or failing that would have to offer some prepackaged browser.

And every device, from a smartphone to a 30" screen running on an octo-Xenon would have to be able to execute the same native code.

And each vendor of a browser kit would try to establish their own web standards to go with their home-grown engine.

I am pretty sure this is not the future of the web, and this seems like a great thing.

And it's not like this is a completely novel idea. None of the proprietary sandboxed browing environments of the past (Flash, Silverlight...) made anything really easier. They sometimes enabled us to do things that were impossible with HTML+JS, but they were all both a pain in the lower back for developers and users and had glaring security holes.
Exactly. There are so many things where a large number of people have claimed that "if you try it, then it will work", while later research found it to be nothing but the placebo effect. This includes acupuncture, chiropractic, etc.
Meditation is to your mind what hacking is to a computer. You're trying to make it do things it would not otherwise do.

(hacking in the sense accepted here on HN, not in the mainstream sense)
People Search Engine
Don’t look at Average Time to Conversion
Nice bit of chart manipulation by Blodget, but if you look at the 12 month view, you see that it's not an abnormal hump:

http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL

If you follow Apple at all, you'd also know that Apple's P/E ratio has been extremely low for the entirety of the iPhone's history.

In this chart, the historical P/E is the blue line:

http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Screen-Shot...
But we have to assume we'll overcome obstacles and not be crushed by them.

There's a big difference between not letting knowledge of obstacles deter us and assuming we'll overcome them. The former is very important, for just the reasons you state. The latter effectively ensures that we will not overcome said obstacles, because we won't have effective plans to do so.
It helps to remember that the purpose of the exercise is not to succeed in maintaining a laser-like focus, but instead to practice noticing your failures.

Right, and I would suggest that there are no failures here — just notice what is going on in your mind, without judging it, and then gently bring your attention back to the breath. As we practice this over time the mind will more easily quiet down. Be the patient observer of your mind and know that you are not your thoughts.

I highly recommend some of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books, and/or some of his videos on YouTube. These have been very helpful to me.
Meditation is resisting your urges. So it's practice for resisting your urges, which makes you better at resisting your urges when it actually matters (like while working). Why not just practice resisting your urges while working and avoid the extra time required for dedicated meditation?
Why do you think they should be recoverable by anyone? You can verify your details against a hash, or reset them anyway.
> It's also a major ethics no-no to withhold known life-saving treatment in the name of continuing a trial.

The problem with this, of course, is that under certain circumstances terminating trials early for ethical reasons causes them to conclude that the treatment works when it doesn't.

Actually, pretty much all the apparently well thought-out ethical restrictions can lead to disaster, and there's even a set of studies that manages to accidentally demonstrate all of them - the randomized controlled trials into circumcision as a form of HIV prevention in Africa. In addition to rather unwisely terminating the study early, they were also careful to use sterile surgical instruments, made sure to inform the participants that they'd still need to use condoms and give them a supply of condoms and education on how to use them, and ensured that the newly-circumcised individuals refrained from sex whilst their wounds healed. All perfectly reasonable ethical requirements, and not ones we'd want to do away with.

Unfortunately, the actual interventions that have been made based on this study have none of those features. Men are being circumcised with bloody instruments, under the belief that this means they don't have to use condoms anymore, and any funding that's going towards circumcision is funding that's not being used to supply condoms and condom education. The difference between what's actually happening and what can ethically be studied is huge and most likely fatal. I suspect the whole thing's going to end up turning out to be another ill-conceived Western intervention that sows distrust a few years down the line.
Credit for ideas is important. I'd rather 100 people falsely accuse me than have one omission slip through. Thanks for caring.
Why does pinging 192.168.072 return a response from 192.168.0.58?
Steve Wozniak calls Apple “arrogant” over iPhone 5 design; wants something wider
> research.microsoft.com

MSR is a different beast from Microsoft itself.
great - i'll shoot you an email.
"Sorry, this website requires MMX. Go buy a new computer, kid."

This is the danger of writing a blog post before reading up on computer history.
New encryption method avoids hacks by saving your password in multiple locations
Correct, the button is is about 190 x 30. It might make a difference that it is is in the tableHeaderView.

http://a1296.phobos.apple.com/us/r1000/118/Purple/v4/56/00/c...

For this table, I also render the cells once and don't dequeue them, because I like to achieve the transparent, gradient effect for each table section, over the classic vertical lines of the grouped UITableView. https://www.dropbox.com/s/67xfol10c0kkqb2/TripComputerCellBa...

In the end, it is really great to have detailed knowledge of UIKit and CoreGraphics, so you save yourself time optimizing on the end, if you just know the right thing to do. And I think your comments about the accuracy of the blog's claims are righteous and a good addition. I envy your fundamental grasp of this stuff, and I try to keep learning, even as I fumble towards what I want.
I think the internet is just trying to find the right abstraction level. And with html5/css3/js/webgl and the newest generation of standards, we almost found it.

We did used to download random binaries from the internet and run them. It took too much effort to get up and running and there were compatibility issues between systems, not to mention dependencies (java / c++ runtimes etc.), dll hell, having to support myriad different OSes and OS versions. When it broke, it broke badly and usually you had 0 chances of debugging, save sending a core dump back over the internet, if the user let you.

Meanwhile, standards came and improved, and finally we realized that we already had a UI toolkit that ran reasonably across all platforms, didn't require any dependency installations, ran "programs" instantly without any download and installation procedure. This alone is as large a marketing win as it is a tech win. Remind you of something? It's the web we know and love today. And you get logs when it breaks. And you can watch your users using it, page by page and get stats. And the limited nature of the abstraction layer means that if it breaks, it doesn't fail as catastrophically, there is less chance of a big fat ugly core dump message, there is more of a chance you almost instantly know. And the hard abstraction layer means that there is a clearer understanding of security implications. Web apps, generally speaking, can't access my files. Can Java applets or ActiveX components? A bit more hazy. Can executables? Yeah. Can this proposed system? Maybe?

The modern web (browser and standards together) is a universal VM and an SDK rolled into one. It's the only one we have that works reasonably well enough and strikes a decent balance between capability and ease of development.

The point of this person's system, which is the proposed freedom from browser restrictions and incompatibilities, is a complete fallacy. Is Microsoft going to recreate this new system for every system under the sun? No. People (and companies like Apple, Google) will have to create their own, and thus incompatibilities will prevail. Open standards are good. Established open standards are better.

Many people tried to create alternatives, and failed miserably. It works. Don't fuck with it.
Weight lifting could be mindfulness, but only if you don't "put on headphones with fast, heavy music". Those headphones are a distraction.
This piece reads so much like the Salon.com piece in 2004: http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/
The name `Tim' got much funnier after Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Thanks, Tim the Enchanter!

Of course the sort is named after Tim Peters, its author, rather than the said character. Sorry, Mr Peters!
In my opinion, Meditation and Mindfullness are not the same thing.

Meditation is a state, where the mind is completely silent, the breath slows waaaay down, the heartbeat slows waaaay down. Slowly ever so slowly, some bliss starts to bubble up from within. It is the climax of one pointed attention. Few people who say they "meditate" are reaching that point since it requires years of sincere effort. In Yoga, meditation is known as Dhyana, or the state resulting from the mind becoming one pointed for 100 seconds. Samadhi, which is considered a state of deep bliss is considered reached when the mind becomes completely still for 1000 seconds.

Mindfullness, is the act of being more aware during daily activities. Like watching actions and interactions. There is a gradual tendency to modify behavior to being more calm, collected and centered which helps to go deeper when attempting to meditate. The mind is still active during mindfullness, but it is being directed or corrected as needed throughout the day.

Meditation helps to develop deeper Mindfullness and vice versa. Meditation is like taking a shower, whereas Mindfullness is avoiding rolling in the mud and getting dirty. It is important to keep in mind that Meditation is literally a state where the mind is free from thought and that all the "meditation practices and techniques" are just different paths of reaching that same place.
Hehe, yeah, I tried explaining too, with all my passion, she just stared at me and said: "I have a nerdy husband" -_-'

I'll give it another shot with that link, perhaps tomorrow :)
He also trashed the Macintosh project until the Lisa bombed, after which he loved it and promptly took it over (making it into Lisa 2 in the process).
No links, no bookmarks, no standard UI conventions and components, no history, no back and forward buttons that work consistently, no mental model of how it all clicks together (page model), no accessibility, no search, no semantic content, no pesky users controlling stuff. Sounds awesome, sign me up.

Sarcasm aside, we're moving in that direction already.
Startup & Investors
I am planning for a startup, I am almost completed my ground work which i have been doing for 2 years. It is all about finding a cheapest deal on internet. We have done complete research on this area.

I have following queries.
1) How to write startup funding?
2) If i am planning to with investor how much and when i should repay the money.
EX: If investor is investing 20,000$ when i should repay the profit
3) Once after investing if the investor is not profitable. Should i need to repay the money or investor invested on his own risk.
If the largest number in the array start at index 0, then in the first sweep `n-sweep_number=n-1` "maybe-swaps" turn into `n-1` swaps, each moving the largest number one spot to the right. So it ends in position `n-1`, which is exactly where it belongs.
To me, consciousness and the mind are but one thing.

In the context of my meditation practice I have come to think of consciousness more like awareness — where I am the observer of the mind and all of its random, discursive activity. Tara Brach has referred to this aspect of mind as the “survival brain” — an evolutionary vestige that is always looking for a threat, or a problem to solve. And if it can’t find an actual threat it will often create an imaginary one.
Just to respond to some of the comments I've seen. Basically, yes it's true that my sites aren't very high profile, and if someone were to target them directly it would be trivial to bypass this system. The point was more that the current, well used bots that send spam randomly, do not work against them.

Interestingly enough one of you, someone who saw the story here, decided to actually write one such bot and start spamming my blog post, but again they were pretty stupid and it was trivial to block. Still, pretty sad that someone would go to this length and actually try and send hundreds of spam posts just for the kick of it.

Also a lot of people mentioned captcha, and yes I guess I should have mentioned that, but the reason I never used one is because I didn't get any spam in the first place.
Haha ... he changed the headline to "Why Apple's Stock is Dropping" and rewrote copy to soften his claims but the CMS retained the earlier "crashing" reference in the URL slug and title element.
Out in the larger world, when we come across a bad idea, we avoid getting involved.

Give people choice about what they work on. And who they work with. Bad ideas will have a more difficult time.

Yes, some people will pick fashionable projects and people to work with. And they will learn from these experiences.

And you can gradually increase choice as people gain knowledge. Let people fail small and you get smarter people making better choices later.
Who actually uses bubble sort except as a class assignment? The whole advantage to the algorithm is it's easy to understand and implement. You learn that one first and then you move on to more practical stuff.

In commercial programming it's pretty rare to run across a situation where writing your own sorting routine makes sense.
You're probably right. They could just be emailing the password in plaintext on account creation and never storing it that way, though that's also pretty bad.
Trying to convince JetBrains to add a feature in PhpStorm
Dunno. I've found purposefully sitting still is much more effective than walking dogs or taking a shower, during which your mind may calm down, but may very well not as well.
072 octal = 58 decimal?

Seems to work. My localhost is 172.16.53.144 and pinging 172.020.53.144 works, returning 172.16.53.144.

Never knew that notation was supported.
Silicon Valley Prefers Obama 2 to 1
For forms that you don't want to annoy the user with a crazy hard to read CAPTCHA, you might want to check out Negative Captchas: https://github.com/subwindow/negative-captcha
FUCK YOUUUUUUUUU
Maybe someone will do some research on this at some point, but yes, it seems fishing is indeed the western male's (it's usually western males that do fishing for leisure, no?) version of meditation. It's not about catching fish, surely.
You're welcome to join us for lunch at ZeroCater. Email in profile.
Better Living Through Electrochemistry
Freshmen Are New Quarry as Tech Companies Hunt Talent
Interview with Notch about his game's interstellar ambition: 0x10c
Game mechanics are not copyrightable. A concrete expression of the rules is copyrightable (you can't copy-paste Monopoly's rule book), as is artwork.

"Play-alike" games are in the clear. "Look-alike" games are not.

I wouldn't say "play monopoly". I'd say "play a property-trading game like Monopoly".
I don't know about insertion sort - you need to do a nested loop through the already-sorted part of the array to find where it should go (which requires knowing how much is already sorted), and move multiple values around when you insert it (easy in a linked list, harder in an array (another nested loop!)).
Well, all the efficient comparison-based sorting algorithms (i.e. O(n log n) time) will cause Omega(n log n) mispredictions. So in a sense they're all the same*

At the same time, quicksort has the very nice property that if it accidentally picks a somewhat unbalanced pivot it naturally biases its branches making them easier to predict. This essentially cheapens the comparison branches it executes. I don't really know if that helps in practice though.

*Unless you jump through hoops/change the model of computation, one such way being conditional move instructions. There are more impractial ways too.
One good way is to use radix sort (it's generally faster for other reasons) and it never compares keys.
Quick Backups with Python and Fabric
> The fact that I can go to a website, right click and view source

"What, and steal mah codez?! Damn you to hell!"

MBAs don't use precisely those words, but the spirit is the same.
The linked article's title: "Curing depression and super-charging cranial capacity with deep brain stimulation"

This ranks as possibly the most irresponsible article title in recent memory, and there's no shortage of candidates. To "cure" depression, we would first need to locate and treat a causative agent. The article describes ways to alleviate symptoms of depression, but it neither discovers nor treats what causes it.
I don't understand your problem with this. It's always interesting to know where SV's movers and shakers stand on various issues, and if you ever have to socialize with them, you'll know what views to express.
They accepted funding a few months ago:

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Andreessen-Horowitz...
It's better than others (mine included), but it's still didn't seem great to me. I just watched a TED Talk (www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me.html) that really hit me as to why tech presentations are usually very boring. I'd rather see someone take the time to turn a presentation into a well-written blogpost than fumble through slides that sometimes just have a 1Password logo.
I flagged this. No politics on HN, not even from PG.
This is likely a service I'd use once in a while. Say I want to convert an html to mobi once per month, the listed pricings do not fit my use case. That means one conversion for 5 bucks.

I know it isn't easy to set up the pricings but would there be any "pay per use" for people like me?